Over the last several years, there has been considerable growth in the availability of digital cable and satellite television broadcasting. As demand for digital programming continues to grow, cable television providers are transitioning from analog cable transmission systems and converters to mixed analog/digital and all-digital cable distribution systems. Increasing competition from digital satellite service providers has contributed to increased demand for more and different digital cable services including digital data services, interactive programming services and “on-demand” services like video-on-demand (VOD). A high-end variant of VOD, “everything-on-demand” (EOD), offers a dedicated, full-time video and audio stream for every user. An EOD stream can be used to view time-shifted TV, movies, or other content stored by content providers at the head end of the network, with full VCR-like controls such as pause, fast forward, random access with “bookmarks”, etc.
In combination with other services like interactive programming, cable Internet services, etc., these per-user services require considerably more infrastructure than do pure broadcast services. These newer, high-end services require a server subsystem to provide dynamically customized multi-program multiplexes on a per-user basis. Clearly, this requires a great deal of high-speed, high-performance processing, data routing, encoding and multiplexing hardware that would not otherwise be required.
As demand continues to grow for these high-end, per-user services, there is a growing need for more efficient, more cost-effective methods of creating large numbers of custom program multiplexes.